


Holes

by pudgy puk (deumion)



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Duskwights, Gen, Gridania-Critical, respectability politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 17:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19322896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deumion/pseuds/pudgy%20puk
Summary: How do you build a home that’s bigger on the inside?





	Holes

**Author's Note:**

> A musing on Duskwights in the Black Shroud. For my dear friend synth.

_How do you build a home that’s bigger on the inside?_

 

He first remembered it as a riddle, a traveling showman’s conceit. Guillefresne still remembered him vividly, even two decades on: A man dressed to what a child thought were the nines, with touches and flourishes just a bit too outlandish—overwaxed mustaches, overfeathered hats, overpainted eyes and lips, just a bit too _much_. He performed feats of trickery and legerdemain, blew shapes in smoke and then in fire, found any number of gilcoins in children’s ears, and posed and answered baffling riddles while juggling a steadily increasing number of strange objects and never once did Guillesfresne see him drop one. Of course, being eight summers old, he’d thought it all terribly wondrous and glamour-filled—not in the least because the showman seemed to be richly-dressed despite having grey skin, like his—and couldn’t understand why his mother wouldn’t let him apprentice to the traveling jongleur.

“We are a _respectable_ family!” She was furious when he asked her, too, and that lecture had ended with him running out of the house, to sulk in the hollow stump of a long-dead heavenspillar. What would have been so bad, he’d wondered, and had resolved to run away with him—except, of course, that by then the performer had left. He always did, as transient as the Wood Wailers thought he and his family were, and by the time he’d returned in the fall, the angry passion had long faded.

Now Guillefresne was grown, and almost as respectable as his mother wanted him to act. Almost—he hadn’t joined the Redbellies or anything so dangerous, but he knew some guys, and some girls, and he often went out of his way to make sure their families had enough food, that no one vandalized their homes, that he saw them often (and could tell a Wood Wailer that he knew for a fact when they were in a given place)—and his wife, Feyenne, she did the same, and watched their children, and would invite them all to dinner. As a grown man, he’d finished the job nature had begun of hollowing out that heavenspillar stump, only he’d turned it into a halfway respectable house (at least his mother couldn’t muster too much to say against it). He had no children of his own, but he and Feyenne were adamant that their home was their friends’—even when it might not be convenient.

So, not for the first time, Guillefresne stood straight and tall and _respectable_ , a heavenspillar of a man like any Shroud elezen, tightly squeezing Feyenne’s hand as the Wailers searched their stump-home. Some vagrants, they’d said. An escaped robber, said their reinforcements. Could be hiding anywhere. Wearing their most concerned faces, they stepped aside and let them look for trapdoors and false walls (Wailers couldn’t fool Guillesfresne; they searched _his_ house and not, say, his employer’s because _he_ was the illegitimate denizen of the Shroud) under pretense of looking for signs his home was targeted.

“Nothing,” said the sergeant, and Guillefresne swallowed a sarcastic quip, a “sorry to disappoint.”

“I hope you find them,” he lied through his teeth.

“We will. Stay safe,” lied the sergeant right back. With that, he and his soldiers left.

When they were all gone, Guillesfresne waited another hour before sending Feyenne to market while he descended to the cellar, and then the floor below the cellar, walled by ancient roots. Behind the wine casks was a stone wall that a bit of conjury could move—and he sighed in relief when he saw what was in the cavern on the other side: His mother and father and the family of a girl he knew, entertaining the children with riddles and puzzles.

 

_How do you build a home that’s bigger on the inside?_


End file.
